I love Unity , but they’ve been working on UI frameworks for almost a decade , all fall short.
Still I need a 3rd party asset to make a decent UI
Ask HN: Why is UI design in Unity so hard?
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Re: Ask HN: Why is UI design in Unity so hard?
#2I'm building a graphics framework based on polygons set into a honeycomb (doesn't have to be a hexagonal honeycomb [0]) - basically you specify a coordinate system, then describe polygons as paths along those coordinates, and then embed text and media within those polygons (flowing the text, clipping the media) -- especially excited about flowing text around arbitrary paths (like you can do in Inkscape/Illustrator but in 3D)
I'm targeting HTML/CSS because it's what I understand, but always imagined I could use the same markup to render in VR / game engines. It would be valuable to me if you described what primitives you expect Unity to give you, and how you wish it worked. Sorry if this is hijacking the thread since I don't have the answer, but I would love to have the answer eventually :)
Re: Ask HN: Why is UI design in Unity so hard?
#3As you dive deeper into Unity, you realize more and more flaws. They promise the world, but only deliver marketable features rather than improving what they've got. The UI Framework is just one of those things.
Re: Ask HN: Why is UI design in Unity so hard?
#4Honestly this is my experience with ui in most, if not all, game engines.
Re: Ask HN: Why is UI design in Unity so hard?
#5I have found unreal’s basic ui editor to be fine.
Unity is, in my opinion, just a poorly managed company with a good product in spite of it. They’ve failed to deliver on many things and the engine has glaring weaknesses, e.g. no networked multiplayer built in. I would bet on the engine generally getting worse over time as management tries to push non functioning new stuff.
Re: Ask HN: Why is UI design in Unity so hard?
#6Unity will never have halfway decent audio, networking, or ui; and not for lack of trying.
The problem is that the one size fits all approach that made then successful falls far short of ideal in areas where there simply isn't a good general case for all of the possible use cases of unity.
For UI, is because no single approach is suitable for all possible combinations of glance, grasp, touch, gamepad, mobile, PC, VR, adaptive web, and with all possible projections and rendering approaches. There may be some commonalities, but no package is going to be great at all those things.
Re: Ask HN: Why is UI design in Unity so hard?
#7Whats a better UI framework? Been a unity game dev since I learned to program properly so I don't even know any better.
Re: Ask HN: Why is UI design in Unity so hard?
#8UI Toolkit is a big improvement over the previous ones, at least.
Re: Ask HN: Why is UI design in Unity so hard?
#9What's wrong with it? I prototype UI's all the time in Unity with no issues? In fact I love the anchoring system?
Re: Ask HN: Why is UI design in Unity so hard?
#10Some history: years ago someone at Unity got in love with one of those 3rd party assets, NGUI (if I remember correctly), they started reproducing it inside the engine and realized there could be problems of interest, so they contracted the asset developer, but relegated him to do boring stuff. The guy got depressed and left the company.
Having worked with the older GUI system I actually like what they have now. But I'd have prefered them to adopt CSS.
Now they bought all those inhouse tools from Peter Jackson they will be busy for years to come plugin them. Someone's dream in Unity is making movies, not UIs.